Turn My World Upside Down: Jo's Story Read Online Free Page B

deeply, in and out, several times until he felt control sliding back into place.
    It wouldn’t last.
    He knew that.
    Accepted it.
    Since the moment he’d first seen Jo Marconi, she’dbeen able to tap into something in him that Cash really didn’t want to encourage. She made him
want
. And damned if he was going to go that route again.
    He’d had his hard lesson a few years ago. He’d learned that as much as he wanted to be a part of a town like Chandler, the safest way was to remain an outsider. Someone who lived on the fringes.
    Trouble was, the fringes weren’t as comfortable as they used to be.
    Turning around, he stalked across the workshop floor, the heels of his worn cowboy boots clacking loudly, toward the full-sized refrigerator on the back wall. Yanking open the door, he grabbed a beer, twisted off the top, and took a long drink, hoping the icy froth would help with the tangle of hot knots inside him. When he closed the door and turned around again, he wasn’t alone.
    “What’re you workin’ on?”
    Startled, Cash told himself he was losing his touch if a ten-year-old could sneak up on him. He shifted a look at the boy standing in the long rectangle of light at the mouth of the shop. “You’re too quiet, kid.”
    Jack Marconi straddled his bike, ratty sneakers planted on either side of the cross bar. His fists were curled around the handlebars and his hair hung down into the pale blue eyes so much like his sisters’. The boy shrugged and twisted the front wheel of his bike back and forth, making the rubber squeak against the concrete.
    Cash sighed, walked to the radio on the workbench and silenced Steven Tyler mid-howl. “What’s going on, Jack?” he asked, leaning back against the edge of the waist-high worktable.
    “Nothin’,” the kid said, and swung his right leg over the bike before letting it drop with a clatter.
    There was a lot of
something
in that “nothin’,” Cash thought and frowned as he watched the boy stroll around the workshop. He never had people here. This was his own personal space. A private retreat where he could go to avoid the rest of the world.
    But how in the hell he could toss the kid out, he didn’t know. Cash saw himself in the boy and it wasn’t really something he liked to admit, even to himself. No point in clinging to memories that weren’t worth a damn. Better to focus on the
now
.
    “You said I could come over sometime,” Jack was saying as he zeroed in on Cash’s work-in-progress and ran one finger along the still rough sides.
    “So I did.” His own damn fault, Cash thought and took another swig of beer. Say something polite to an adult, and they almost never took you up on it. Say it to a kid, and pretty soon that kid was showing up on your doorstep, whether you wanted him to or not.
    The kid was only ten, but his feet were big enough to trip him up constantly. His jeans were baggy, his shirt stained. His hair, the color of Jo’s, was long enough that the boy had to keep jerking his head to one side just to keep from being blinded. He was too quiet for his age, but then, having your world turned upside down on you could do that.
    “Your sister know you’re here?”
    Jack shot him a look and shrugged again. “She’s not home. At a meeting with Sam and Mike at Mike’s house.”
    “So she doesn’t know.” Cash winced as he imagined Jo’s reaction to her little brother’s riding his bike thetwo miles to Cash’s place. But it was too late now to avoid the storm that would descend when she found out.
    “She won’t care,” Jack said softly, picking up the heavy planer to study it.
    “That’s sharp,” Cash said before the kid could cut himself. “And she
will
care. Trust me.”
    “Only ’cause you make her mad.”
    “Well, yeah,” he said, remembering their conversation earlier that day. “I do.”
    “Besides, she’s just my sister, she’s not my
mom
,” Jack muttered, and if possible, his narrow shoulders drooped even